Between Logic and Soul: Korlan's Journey from Kazakhstan to the Frontiers of AI

This March, for our Women in Tech campaign, we celebrate women who defy the single-story version of what a technologist looks like. Korlan is one of them. She codes and she dances. She optimises algorithms and writes Russian poetry. She stays up late dismantling complex academic papers — and finds joy in every second of it. She is exactly the kind of person the future of tech needs more of, and exactly the kind of person Harbour.Space was built to attract.

Korlan comes from Kazakhstan, a country she describes as a land of beautiful contrasts, her life split between the freezing streets of Astana and the warm, sun-drenched energy of Almaty. That ability to hold two different worlds at once, to find harmony between extremes, turned out to be one of her greatest strengths as a technologist.

When she's not coding, Korlan is expressing herself through Russian poetry, singing, and the rhythms of Bachata, Salsa, and belly dance. She grounds herself through spiritual practice, studying the Bible, meditating, and dives into personal projects involving computer vision, geometry, and image rendering for the sheer joy of it. She calls herself a believer in the harmony between logic and soul. It shows in everything she does.

Korlan completed her Master's in Data Science at Harbour.Space, an intense, rigorous journey through Numerical Optimisation & Linear Algebra, Advanced Algorithms & Data Structures, and Data Storages. But it was her capstone project that truly showed what she's made of.

Titled "Prompt-Tuned YOLO for Vegetable Detection", her final project brought AI directly to the agricultural industry. Working with the YOLO-World vision-language model, she developed a system capable of detecting defects in potatoes, a practical, scalable solution for quality control in global food supply chains.

What makes it remarkable isn't just the application. It's the elegance of the approach. Rather than opting for an expensive full-model retraining, Korlan used prompt-tuning, fine-tuning the text embeddings while keeping the model's visual core intact. The result: improved accuracy with limited data, at a fraction of the cost. Smart, efficient, and built for the real world.

Ask Korlan what she'll never forget about Harbour.Space, and she doesn't hesitate: the marathon days. Eight, nine, ten hours in the university, deep in Advanced Algorithms, collaborating with brilliant classmates to crack problems that didn't want to be cracked.
One night stands out. She stayed up late to work through a complex paper on the Universal Geometry of Embeddings for her Neural Networks class and surprised herself with how much she could comprehend under pressure. "An 'aha!' moment," she calls it, with the quiet pride of someone who knows exactly how hard they've worked.

But beyond the academic intensity, what she treasures most is simpler: the people.

At Harbour.Space, that's not an aspiration, it's the baseline.

Korlan arrived in Barcelona with zero expectations. A year and a half later, she's still discovering it. She loves that the city is a thriving EU startup hub, drawing an international, forward-thinking digital community from across the world. But what truly moves her is something harder to quantify.

Walking through neighbourhoods that pre-date the Roman Empire. Stepping on stones that are thousands of years old while building the technology of the future. She's right, it's a feeling you can't find anywhere else.

Korlan's story is a reminder that the best technologists bring their whole selves to the work, their curiosity, their culture, their contradictions. If her journey resonates with you, Harbour.Space wants to hear from you.

Throughout March, all accepted women receive €5,000 off their tuition fee. Your background, your passions, your contradictions, bring all of it. That's exactly what we're looking for.